The Invention of Paris: A History in Footsteps BY Eric Hazan (Verso Books, 2011) From the Publisher: “The Invention of Paris is a tour through the streets and history of the French capital under the guidance of radical Parisian author and publisher Eric Hazan. Hazan reveals a city whose squares echo with the riots, rebellions and revolutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Combining the raconteur’s ear for a story with a historian’s command of the facts, he introduces an incomparable cast of characters: the literati, the philosophers and the artists — Balzac, Baudelaire, Blanqui, Flaubert, Hugo, Maney, and Proust, of course; but also Doisneau, Nerval and Rousseau. It is a Paris dyed a deep red in its convictions. It is haunted and vitalized by the history of the barricades, which Hazan retells in rich detail. The Invention of Paris opens a window on the forgotten byways of the capital’s vibrant and bloody past, revealing the city in striking new colors.”

Eric Hazan has written a marvelous book. The Invention of Paris is a dense meditation on a city that rewards the act of walking its streets. It is not a guide book, though any resident or visitor will learn a great deal by reading it. It is a four-dimensional portrait, interweaving the three dimensions visible to the walker’s senses with the fourth dimension of time. Hazan offers a vision of Paris that penetrates through centuries, as though he can see directly through the sidewalk to the foundations that archeologists uncover beneath construction sites or feel the walls of long-destroyed houses and the mud of former cart-ruts. To these he adds the fifth dimension of French literature, as he cites Balzac and Hugo, who describe settings for the creation of a fiction that preserves a “real” place no longer with us. This walk across a five-dimensional chess board is consistently framed by political analysis that is passionate and engaged. Hazan is a spokesman for the French intellectual tradition that aligns with no parties and no “isms” while seeing the comédie humaine as a continuous struggle for revolution. The Invention of Paris is a dense meditation on a city that rewards the act of walking… It is a four-dimensional portrait, interweaving the three dimensions visible to the walker’s senses with the fourth dimension of time. His agenda is presented in the organization of the book. First, “Walkways” takes us for a walk through each section of the modern city, though his narrative is more often focused on what was once there than what is there today. After having shown us each arrondissement, “Red Paris” takes us on a tour of the insurrections that took place in 1830, 1848 and 1871. In the end, “Crossing the swarming scene…” returns to the writers, photographers and painters of the nineteenth century — quotations from Nerval, Baudelaire and Balzac, the photos of Marville and Atget along with the paintings of Manet, Degas and Monet — whose response to the city they knew both preserves and creates our response to what we see today. In some ways it is really two books: the tour and the commentary. The “Walkways” describes our common set, the theatre in which any of us experience the city, whether we are visitors or residents. The book was completed in 2000 (the original French edition appeared in 2002) and one of the most remarkable truths about his review of Paris’ urban reality is how little of the twentieth century city he chooses to describe. Hazan defines the reality of each district, its boundaries and nature, primarily from nineteenth century sources, describing how the eighteenth century metropolis was transformed from the estates and monastic quarters of the ancien régime into the bourgeois and workers’ districts that engaged repeatedly in acts of civil war, and then modernized (in some sense neutralized) by the “cuts” created by Haussmann’s design. As he walks us through the streets, he sees what is there today in terms of the streams, trades, theatres and markets that were there before.

I live in an apartment in Paris located in the 11th arrondissement. My place of work is located in the 3rd arrondissement. The distance between the two buildings is about one mile. I have been traversing this route daily for many years, through the four seasons, morning and evening. Sometimes I travel by foot, sometimes by bicycle. Along the way I pass beggars, people lined up to have documents processed at the police office, bakeries, Boole players, dog walkers, people chattering in cafes, school groups exiting or entering a hotel that specializes in school tourists, tourists puzzling over maps, city workers cleaning the streets, and wholesalers unloading racks and boxes of clothing.

This reader is entirely convinced that the author has walked these streets, including the ones that are no longer there, many times. His book takes you there with his own feet.

A pattern of streets is a record of how an urban space is used. In my two districts, the direction of the streets — what they are connecting — and their width are an immediate record of time. One does not need a set of historical maps to judge the age of the streets. Streets designed for carts and horses are narrower than boulevards designed for armies and artillery. Two walkers cannot pass each other between the parked cars and the parking ticket machines on the older streets, and a truck unloading food for the school or metal bars for a workshop blocks even bicycles and motor scooters from passing. The name of a street will change at an intersection, recording the fact that this street went from here to there perhaps for centuries and later another street was made to go from there to someplace further in the same direction. Or a street name will change from rue Saint Antoine to rue Faubourg Saint Antoine to mark the former inside and outside boundary of the city.

Hazan’s prose brilliantly evokes this sense of time written in the streets for all those parts of the city he knows by foot. As I read along with his footsteps, I have the sense of walking with a man who carries an enormous library of French literature and history in his head. I have spent perhaps too many hours poring over the Turgot map, a masterpiece of eighteenth century draftsmanship which represents, on sixteen large plates, not only every street but a complete elevation of every building that existed in the Paris of the 1730s. This has helped me see beyond the current street grid and understand where the Temple used to be, but this mere 280 years is myopic compared to what Hazan sees. In his eyes each current district can be understood by an essential shape defined by buildings and boundaries that once were there, whether that shape was a hill since flattened or stream now covered that predates any hotels created during the Bourbon dynasty or rows of theatres and cafes in the 1860s. His description of the Marais, now the 3rd and 4th arrondissement, is a good example:

This is illustrated by one of the hand-drawn maps Hazan created to show where the streets and main buildings once were. He draws in a few lines the 15th century. The presentation is as erudite as it is artisanal. I had no notion of the Hôtel Saint-Pol and the Hôtel des Tournelles, as they were already gone in the eighteenth century map, but once he describes them I can see how they shaped the districts that are there today.

I am reminded of Rebecca Solnit’s Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas, which contains graphic maps of the Bay Area by a dozen artists illustrating different dimensions of the region’s natural, social and political history. What Solnit does collectively (and as a result not coherently), Hazan accomplishes with solitary ease and simple line drawings. He shows you what he sees with his own words, the judiciously selected words of the literature he has absorbed and his own simple sketches. This reader is entirely convinced that the author has walked these streets, including the ones that are no longer there, many times. His book takes you there with his own feet.

I find Hazan’s political framework difficult to describe, not because it is difficult to understand — he makes his case for good guys and bad guys — but because it comes from a point of view that is rooted in the French state and anti-state. The most amusing side effect of his account of the insurrections is how it illuminates the names of today’s Parisian boulevards: Auguste Blanqui, Armand Barbés, François Raspail and Alexandre Ledru-Rollin all faced each other on barricades before they became the names of boulevards difficult to cross. He simply presents the twentieth century as uninteresting, an after-the-fact period that scars and destroys the city that inhabits it. He is unashamedly anachronistic. The entire urban transport system of Paris — car, metro, bus, motorcycle, bicycle — is missed, along with the effect this has on people’s lives. Movement is entirely on foot. The world he admires seems to end in 1905 with a small coda of Surrealists. With the exception of Walter Benjamin and Heinrich Heine, all the observers of Paris he quotes are French.

It is to Hazan’s credit that his ultimate evidence for a view of a city in constant civil war between the Party of Order and the People relies primarily on the city itself.

The title of a current exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay, “Manet: The Invention of the Modern” is characteristic of this French sense of modernity in the past. Manet, whose paintings injected scenes of contemporary Paris into fine arts, much to the outrage of critics, and whose politics were aligned with the Commune, is one of the book’s heroes. The 2011 exhibition contains nearly every painting Hazan describes. But while gazing through the crowded gallery at the gravity and power of these paintings I still find it difficult to understand how incendiary they were in the French struggle between what should be and what is.

It is to Hazan’s credit that his ultimate evidence for a view of a city in constant civil war between the Party of Order and the People relies primarily on the city itself. He ends the “Walkways” with a “very Parisian antithesis,” a description of two of the entrances to contemporary Paris, the first on the wealthy western side, where the city’s highway ring (le périphérique) disappears into a tunnel, and the second on the poor eastern side of the city:

In this way, his feet and eyes permit the city to speak for itself.